October 9, 2006 Optimizing a website is only part of the SEO / SEM process. Once a site is optimized for the search engines, you still have to consider «old-fashioned» ways of marketing your product or service. Before the Internet, we used magazines, billboards, T.V. commercials and endorsements, among other creative ways to advertise. The Internet is no different. You have to get your name out there and bring hits to your site. Let’s check one of these methods. Banner Ads If the Internet is the «information super highway,» then banners would be our billboards. Basically, banners will be a small picture or animation placed on other websites that, when clicked, would lead to your website. You can see an example by going to MSN.com in the upper right corner of the search engine. There is always an advertisement there. Most sites implement banners in much the same way, setting up a specified space for banners. This creates an advertising space, providing the ad to a potential customer, yet preventing an annoyance that would be created with pop-ups. I won’t name any specifics (Mostly because I don’t like banners myself. Hated billboards…hate these. But hey, they work and we use what works), but there are a number of banner services out there to get you started. You can find every service from the creation of a banner, online editors for those do-it-yourselfers, the promotions of an already created banner, and everything in between. Now, if you go to MSN and see a banner, then go back 5 minutes later, you will see a different banner ad. They rotate, giving MSN the power to provide banner space for more than one customer. Most services that offer the promotion of a banner advertisement, do it in one of two ways. You can purchase «impressions,» which means that if your banner is shown to a website’s visitor, regardless of a click through or not, that counts as 1 impression. Usually these impressions are purchased in large blocks, sometimes in the tens of thousands. The second way is a purchase of an amount of clicks. This means that your banner is shown as many times as is necessary to use up the determined amount of down payment you provide to the service, much in the same way a Pay-Per-Click service is handled. Google (I know I know. I said I wouldn’t promote any, but I like Google) provides a banner service in this way with their Adwords program. There are other service methods, like trading banner clicks, in where if you show a banner, and it gets a click, your banner will be shown somewhere for the same amount of clicks, but the first 2 are the most popular.

I said that I don’t like banners. But that wasn’t because they don’t work. It’s really just one of the many ticks I have. Banners do indeed work…greatly. If you have a well designed and worded banner, and the service you use, you can get a good amount of relevant traffic, for a fairly low price. Like every form of marketing out there, you have to play with it though. Sometimes you may not get a click through for something so simple as a bad color or too many/ too few words. Find out what works for you, and you could be a very happy banner….ummm…person.

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